coolmuse

there are lots of posts about using caspol to solve problems when running .net apps from a network drive or share.  e.g. http://blogs.msdn.com/b/shawnfa/archive/2004/12/30/344554.aspx.

the documentation at msdn is rather impenetrable: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee191568(VS.100).aspx.  Apparently .Net 4.0 has totally changed the way all this works.

my situation is this:

• fresh install of Windows 7 SP1, all patched up and running in a VirtualBox VM (64-bit);
• Visual Studio 2010;
• .Net 4.0;
• all compilation happening through a VirtualBox shared  folder, which makes it looks like a network location; and
• i’m compiling a large enterprise app which has to stay targeted at .net 3.5 for the time being.

since my apps are targeted at pre-.Net 4.0 frameworks, I’ll need to use caspol.exe to run anything on the shared folder, which is mapped to the network letter f:.

trying to apply advice from the sites linked above does not result in any immediate gratification.  After flailing about for a good 32 minutes, the 64-bit penny drops: security policy for 64-bit and 32-bit version of the framework are maintained separately!  If I had just read shawnfa’s blog post a little more carefully, I would have noticed that.

so make sure the version of caspol you are running comes from the right version of the framework. Doh!

32-bit: %windir%\Microsoft.Net\Framework\v2.0.50727\caspol.exe
62-bit: %windir%\Microsoft.Net\Framework64\v2.0.50727\caspol.exe

since everything is being developed on a mapped network drive f:, here are the final commands I used to ensure that  I can develop both 32- and 64-bit apps from that drive targeted at older .Net versions:

C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework>v2.0.50727\CasPol.exe -m -ag 1 -url file://F:\* FullTrust -n "F Drive"
C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework64>v2.0.50727\CasPol.exe -m -ag 1 -url file://F:\* FullTrust -n "F Drive"

ciao!